One of the biggest areas of overlap between the server sig and thincrust
is in a minimum package set definition that can be extended for
different needs/applications.
Thincrust already includes an official Fedora spin, the AOS, which is
hosted in the "spin kickstart pool"[1]. The AOS is basically a
kickstart file describing a minimal appliance OS that includes: the
kernel, yum, dns, grub, and se-linux, all working on start-up.
The first cut of the AOS was built by removing everything, ie. not
including core or base, and adding the packages we needed. We also
tired to exclude extra packages that got brought in as deps. This
produces an disk image of 140 packages and is ~360M.
While I am not saying this is the prettiest and/or the best approach, it
was a quick way of producing a working appliance definition with a
relatively small foot print using the current tools.
Ideally any "Server spin" would be extensions of this minimum OS
definition. I would love to see the the AOS definition evolve to become
a better and smaller minimum OS definition.
I am in the process of defining the AOS requirements[2] for the F-11
Spin and would love to get some feedback from the server sig.
I am looking for ideas/suggestion/opinions on what would be the best way
of redefine the AOS into a smaller, more fine gained, minimum server
definition. Something that can be easily be extended by others?
-D
[1]
http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=spin-kickstarts.git;a=blob_plain;f=fed...
[2]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AOS_Spin

Hi,
In the last few days I've started experimenting with some advanced features
in order to create a storage cluster for a relatively large setup (several
servers need shared access to about 30TB of space). Basically what I am
trying to set up is either a GFS or OCFS2 cluster using iSCSI devices as
block-level storage.
What I noticed though is that the required tools in Fedora seem to be in a
state of neglect and I'm wondering what the gameplan is both for the Server
SIG and future RHEL releases that presumably are derived from these tools.
Here is what I've run into so far:
"scsi-target-utils" seems to be the recommended package to create iscsi
targets but it doesn't seem to be well integrated. Configured devices
aren't brought online on boot nor are they switched to offline during
shutdown resulting in error messages like "Targets still in use. Cannot
shutdown service.". The package "netbsd-iscsi" which also provides iscsi
target functionality seems to be much better integrated.
OCFS2 seems to be broken in F10 because of a missing line in the init.d file:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=476469
"system-cluster-config" has missing dependencies and references files in
the wrong places:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477496https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=477499
I think the Server SIG is the perfect place to address these issues and
maybe come up with some recommendations/best practices regarding advanced
setups involving the above tools.
Regards,
Dennis

> From dan at danny.cz Mon Dec 1 14:05:39 2008
> From: dan at danny.cz (Dan =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hor=E1k?=)
> Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:05:39 +0100
> Subject: Server SIG - work areas
> Message-ID: <1228140339.3664.75.camel(a)eagle.danny.cz>
>
> Hello,
Sorry for replying to an old thread however I am just now catching up on
the discussions from this list. My first impression is that there looks
to be a lot in common with the server sig and the "thincrust" project,
www.thincrust.org. We are still in the early stages of the thincrust
project, however some of the things we have been working on are:
1. Light weight base OS = AOS, currently a fedora spin
2. Tool to build reproducible appliance images form kickstart files,
appliance-creator, see the tooling section or the appliance-tools rpm.
3. Best practices and tools for post install setup for "appliances", we
are currently using puppet, see the "ACE" section of the web site.
Please check out the site and let us know if there any questions or
feedback.
One of the next steps for thincurst is to redefine the AOS package set
to make it smaller, more fine gained, and more reusable/extendible,
which seems to similar to some of the goals of the server list.
more comments below....
>
> it has been some time when the Server SIG was announced. And one goal
> has been already almost accomplished - to start discussion about the
> needs of the server community. For "Server" specific issues I have
> opened our own mailing list - subscribe at
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fedora-server-list
>
> One question raised during the discussions was "what is a server" and
> the answer can be simple. The server is a combination of bootloader,
> kernel and "the server", where "the server" can be a file server, web
> server, database server, application server, etc. It is quite common to
> have just one service running per hardware (both physical and virtual).
> But a mix of running servers is also possible :-)
We have a similar definition for an appliance.
>
> There are miscellaneous goals written on the wiki page, so it is time to
> get them a little bit organized and to divide the work into more
> specific areas. And they are here:
>
> Installer
> - work with the anaconda team to keep anaconda suitable for server
> installs (text mode, kickstarts, ...)
> - create a lightweight installer/bootstraper
see the appliance-creator, http://thincrust.net/tooling.html
>
> Server services
> - bring more server packages into Fedora
> - encourage creation of EPEL branches for existing packages
>
> Kernel
> - everything about the kernel side of servers
We have not done anything here, however we have discussed pulling out
some kernel modules that are not needed for virtual appliances. There
is not an easy way of doing this without "breaking" rpm, current
thinking is to use white/black listing of actual files.
>
> Admins corner
> - place for administration and monitoring technologies available in
> Fedora
> - collects pointers to how-tos and other docs useful for administrators
> - work on the TUI counterparts of GUI system-config-* tools, should go
> in hand with the backend/frontend separation
See: http://thincrust.net/ace-console.html
>
> Security
> - improve/monitor the security standards for current server software
> - help the desktop developers with the security aspects of their work
>
> QA
> - testing
>
Comments and suggestions welcome.....
-D

From the Wiki page at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Server#Installer
What exactly do we mean by lightweight?
What exactly do we mean by bootstrapping?
I'm inclined to shout "Genome!" but I'm not sure I read this the same
way as you do.
Thanks in advance,
Kind regards,
Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip